‘Zucchini’ is a sweet tale of orphaned youth
Of the five films nominated for Best Animated Feature, one was a Swiss-French production titled "My Life as a Zucchini," which is playing at the Magic Lantern. Following is the review of the film that I wrote for Spokane Public Radio:
We all know what kinds of hell orphans have to endure. We learned about them in books written by Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, in movies made by Martin Scorsese and David Lean.
Orphans live lonely lives, often in abusive situations. They never get enough to eat. They never get enough love. Sometimes they don’t get any love at all.
Except … very little of any of that exists in “My Life as a Zucchini,” a French-made, Oscar-nominated animated film directed by Claude Barras. Adapted from the novel by Gilles Paris, “My Life as a Zucchini” tells a tale that differs from your standard orphan story.
Oh, it has sadness. Through it we meet Icare, a young boy living with his drunk of a mother – a woman who would rather swill beer and watch television than fulfill even the slightest of her parental duties. She doesn’t even call her son by his given name, referring to him only as “Zucchini.” Even so, it comes as a surprise – this is, after all, an animated film – when Icare, through accident, brings about her death.
That’s how Zucchini ends up at an orphanage. Yet here is where things diverge from the familiar. This orphanage is like a boarding school, though – again – unlike anything similar to what is portrayed in, say, “Tom Brown’s School Days.” No, this school is run by a caring staff that showers the children with affection and understanding.
Whether teaching class, discussing an impending pregnancy, taking the kids on a weekend trip to see mountain snow, the staff members are never less than human – which is just what the young orphans need.
And the children themselves are simply that: boys and girls, most coming from some sort of troubled background, but still communing the way kids do: Showing off, playing, trying to one-up each other, at times being nasty, but mostly just getting to know one another. And, ultimately, becoming family.
Slowly, then, Zucchini adapts. The years of living without a father, who’d abandoned him and his alcoholic mother, slowly drift away. The red-haired boy who initially is mean to him becomes a friend. The policeman who questions him about his mother’s death visits regularly. A new girl, named Camille, becomes a love interest.
And the one complicating factor, the aunt who wants to take charge of Camille for the simple reason that foster-parenting will bring her money, provides the key that binds the orphans.
At an hour and six minutes, “My Life as a Zucchini” is barely long enough to qualify as a feature film. And maybe it could have benefitted by one more plot sequence, something to provide an added complication and richness. But, then again, Barras’ film feels fine just as it is.
Its Claymation images, bizarrely imagined as they are, can’t begin to mask the range of emotions Barras’ characters want to convey.
Emotions that, though they’ve been the subject of many other books and films, feel new, seem fresh and, in the end, are sweet – but never sickeningly so.